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Sometimes when I smell a perfume and there is music playing in the background, something happens. A magical synergy, that ties both the perfume and the song into a tight knot, so I can’t think of one without the other. And listening to the song while re-smelling the perfume often brings back the intensity of the first experience of smelling it. This happened to me when I first smelled Mona di Orio’s Oud *. The song that was playing on my […]

Emptiness, my bride who whistles, who listens? Last week, I came across a couple of lines by Slovene poet Tomaz Salamun in a talk by another poet. Something about these lines requires no context. I haven’t read the poem it belongs to; don’t even know which poem it belongs to. Yet, I thrill to these words suspended in internet ether. What are some of your favorite lines from a poem? Picture Credit: Not sure of the exact source; found it via […]

It has been a really long while since I posted. I had sort of promised myself that I wouldn’t post or comment about perfume until I finished a certain piece of work that needed to be finished more than a year ago. I’m still not close to being done with that, but I found this post of mine in the drafts. It was written a while ago (so it doesn’t count as breaking my promise, does it?). But first I […]

I had been drooling at the various accounts of Viktoria Minya’s Hedonist but Victoria’s review at Eaumg made me long to try it, to see if it really was all that. How could a perfume that was supposed to smell of peaches and honey smell that good? Thankfully my longing did not reach epic proportions because the generous and darling Suzanne offered to send me a sample. And like Victoria said, I inhaled it, smiled and wanted the rest of […]

I came to know Undina from Undina’s Looking Glass because of her desire to share what she finds beautiful, specifically, Annick Goutal’s Heure Exquise. I’ve heard her say before that when she loves a perfume, she doesn’t like to analyze why she loves it, and so I approached her for this project just a bit apprehensively. Yet since Undina is one who loves to tell it like it is, without mincing words, I was also very curious to hear what her thoughts on […]

While I was on an unofficial blogging break, I came upon a comment by Mridula Koshy on a post, urging me to try the mitti attar in a shop called Gulabchand in Old Delhi. I was grateful for this information as I am always on the look out for such places in India. Subsequently, I stumbled upon her blog via Persolaise’s blog and discovered that in addition to being a perfume lover, Mridula is also a published author. I am […]

If you read Natalie’s writing about perfume, you will quickly recognize that her blog is not just ‘another’ perfume blog. Her writing is incisive and honest and provides interesting ‘angles’ on perfume : an approach that I identify with and which keeps me coming back for more. 1) What do you mean when you call something beautiful? Do you have different definitions when you talk of different things like faces, art, landscape? Or is everything you find beautiful characterized by […]

Tara is a regular contributor to Birgit’s Olfactoria’s Travels and comes across as a lovely person, quietly passionate. I enjoy her thoughtful comments on perfume and the precision of her writing, which is especially evident in her answers to these questions on beauty. 1) What do you mean when you call something beautiful? Do you have different definitions when you talk of different things like faces, art, landscape? Or is everything you find beautiful characterized by something similar? When I call something […]

Sigrun Olafsdottir’s perfume reviews come as a breath of fresh air. Her descriptions are often unusual, yet spot on. I still remember her review of Aftelier’s Cepes and Tuberose, and how, to her, the perfume embodied the scent of a pair of (nice) trolls in a Swedish horror story. If you can’t see the connection, go read her review! After reading her thoughts on beauty of course. 1) What do you mean when you call something beautiful? Do you have different […]